House Shelit
This article contains non canon material and needs to be seperated House Shelit was discovered during the conquest of Hira. A noble house seperated culturally from the Known Worlds it has developed an extremely sophisticated cybernetic capability. Known for having three lettered names and an almost mechanical disposition they are now allied with The Hazat against their crusade on the Kurga Caliphate House Shelit is slowly being integrated into the Known Worlds. They are typically very ultra-rational, dispassionate, conservative and low in profile. Virtually every member of the house has at least one cybernetic limb. Their fiefs are concentrated in the Teikorc province of Hira. An enigmatic house by any standards, the Shelit have endured countless Inquisitorial investigations but proven their worth as allies to House Hazat on countless occasions. The first the Known Worlds learned of the Shelit was in 4432, when Vladimir Alecto pushed the Pharaonate invaders back to the newly-discovered Hira and the Shelit revealed themselves to the Hazat. They called themselves merely “Shelit” and would not comment on the strange ways of their house, seeming to know little of their own history save that they had been maintaining knowledge and technological experience in secret on Hira and would oppose the Pharaonate forces if granted security and land. House Hazat offered them a throne-in-exile on Vera Cruz as House Shelit in exchange for an adoption of certain aspects of noble culture and an oath of obedience to House Hazat. The Shelit agreed and moved their key personnel to Vera Cruz. With barbarians swarming all over the Known Worlds, the Inquisition accepted their new conversion in exchange for the information the new house could provide on the Pharaonate. Since then Inquisitorial investigations of technosophy into the strange and mechanistic house, though ongoing, have been conducted within certain carefully delimited parameters, and have tended to target lower-level members of the house. House Shelit has used its technological expertise to give the lords of House Hazat possibly the best combat cybernetics and combat drugs in the Known Worlds, though some purists believe that this is creating an unhealthy dependence in the house on Shelit cyberware. The lords of the house tend to administer industrial areas, though they have shown some skill at agriculture as well. Shelit are rarely called upon by House Hazat to take to the field in open war. Though they seem to have little fear of death, they also show little enthusiasm for combat, and are nowhere near the caliber of the Hazat as soldiers in any case. They do, however, make excellent combat engineers, advisors, and scouts, and many Hazat war parties will bring along Shelit for technical support. Shelit culture is almost entirely unrecognizeable to Known Worlds observers. Although members of the house use noble rank when dealing with foreign houses, among themselves they use numbers to denote rank. Knights are denoted by a “3” before their name, baronets are 9, barons are 27, earls and marquises are both 81, viscounts are 243, counts are 729, and the duke is known as 2187. Each ruler is known as the ExMini, and is assisted by the MiniProgRep, in charge of both education and commerce, and the MiniSocHar, in charge of police and military duties. The MiniProgRep’s numerical value for lords of different ranks is always 2/3 of that of the ExMini (therefore 2, 6, 18, 54, 162, 486, and 1458), and that of the MiniSocHar is 2/3 of the ExMini minus 1, (therefore 1, 5, 53, 161, 485, and 1457). It is very rare for Shelit not to be found in triads of ExMini, MiniProgRep, and MiniSocHar- in the case of knights and baronets, the roles are not called by name, but each of them will usually either have two attendants with similar roles or be one of those attendants. They are often called ThreeLines, TwoLines, and Lesser TwoLines. The roles are always gender-neutral. Shelit family life is actually fairly familiar for known worlders, with lifetime marriages (known as pairbonds) producing children of the same rank as the highest-ranking parent, unless countervened by a vote called by the nearest ranking ThreeLine (as those of the progression 3, 9, 27 etc are called), in which case the child can demoted. Children are taught from an early age a long series of mnemonics and retain an incredible amount of technical knowledge. The primary passion of the Shelit seems to preserving and developing their cybernetic technology. They are quite adept at this, and every year the Inquisition grows ever more rueful of its acceptance of their entry into the Known Worlds. At the urging of House Hazat, they have taken pains to moderate their research and experimentation. The Shelit emblem is a stylized cog wheel around a complex interlocking set of rings. The Shelit colors are grey, black, white, and green. Category:Minor Houses